As a leader, are the daily demands of work, family and life causing you to feel stretched?  Do you feel pulled between conflicting priorities?  Are you stressed because there is never enough time in the day to do everything on your list?

If you answered “yes,” you are not alone.  You have officially joined the ranks of living and working in the 21st century!  In our fast paced, technology driven world, more and more leaders feel the pressure to raise the bar, to do more, to be more….more innovation, greater performance, increased growth, continuous improvement.   The list of “needs” can seem endless and overwhelming…and those are just a few of the more strategic “to do’s.”  These big picture items don’t include the daily details of work life nor does it include your thoughts, concerns or responsibilities in your personal life – your health, finances, family, spiritual well being, your community and other relationships.

If you find that you are living stretched and stressed, take heart!  There is a remedy.  Living and working INTENTIONALLY will make the difference.  Leaders who live and work with “intention” experience higher levels of success, make a greater impact on their business and in their community and enjoy stronger, more meaningful relationships all the while reducing their stress level.  Sound too good to be true?  It isn’t.  As a partner to leaders, both emerging leaders as well as seasoned, experienced executives, Executive Impact equips and empowers you not only to meet but exceed the challenges of living and working in the 21st century.

As an employer, do you have a “talent mindset”?  Is your leadership team fully engaged and proactively working to achieve the goals of the organization?

So what is the “talent mindset” anyway? 

The talent mindset, simply stated, is the passionate belief that to achieve aspirations for any business, organizations must have great talent.  Statistically speaking, companies who embrace a talent mindset and who make attracting, engaging, developing and retaining great talent a top priority have greater success in the marketplace.  

To share an example from the book THE WAR FOR TALENT by Michaels, Handfield-Jones and Axelrod, Les Wexner began his career by helping his parents in their store in a suburban Columbus, Ohio, shopping center.  In 1963, he started The Limited, so named because the store focused on clothing for younger women, unlike his parent’s general merchandise store.  Over the next twenty-five years, he built a massive organization of retail stores including The Limited Express, Victoria’s Secret, and Bath and Body Works.  By 1990, he had 3800 stores and $5 billion in sales.  In the early 1990’s, however, earnings hit a wall and the company’s stock value plunged.   Wexner was working harder than ever, but he knew something was desperately wrong. 

Wexner began to seek out leaders he respected to get counsel on how best to address the challenges he was facing.  He met with leaders in their respective industries ~ leaders like Steven Spielberg, Jack Welch (GE), Wayne Callaway (PepsiCo) to determine how they so effectively ran their businesses.  After in-depth interviews with these leaders, Wexner discovered the common theme running through all of these successful businesses was the focus on talent management…how well the companies recruited, developed and retained talented people.  It was the talent that made these organizations successful.

As a result of his findings, Wexner launched a new talent management strategy with this new “talent mindset” driving the process.  He partnered with a firm to help him create a talent strategy that would bring about substantial change.  Within three years, the company’s performance had dramatically improved and the stock price had almost doubled.  Focusing on the company’s talent was not the only thing that brought about the positive change in the financial performance of the organization, but Wexner indicated “talent was the most important thing.” 

As a leader, you do not have to allow your business to “hit the wall” before you embrace a talent mindset.  You can begin today to:

• embrace a deep conviction that great talent leads to better corporate performance
• believe and act on the reality that all managers are accountable for strengthening and developing their talent pool
• incorporate talent management strategies into the central efforts of running the business
• take bold actions to build your team.

Wexner is one example of a leader who experienced exponential success from investing in his people.  And it all started with his change to a “talent mindset.”

Today, coaches are most recognizable in the sports and fitness arenas.

Over the recent past, the same strategy is being used in business.  Executive coaches are now being employed to partner with leaders and their team members to empower them to maximize their performance potential.  Executive coaching is a quantifiable development model that has a proven track record of yielding an ROI for those clients and organizations truly committed to the process.When executive coaching first appeared on the business scene, the primary focus was to work on the so-called “problem employees” that no one else was quite able to help.  Executive coaching was credited with “saving” many of these high potentials that, for one reason or another, were not achieving success.

While helping high potential employees reconnect and achieve success continues to be an ongoing effort in the coaching industry, many executive coaches have expanded their role to partner with any professional, emerging leader or executive who wants to accelerate their success and become the superstar they are intended to be.  Strategic performance improvement and leadership development has been integrated into the executive coaching process and has proven to be an extremely successful venue for long term employee and leader development.

Executive coaching, the process by which professionals, emerging leaders and executives are equipped, encouraged and empowered to reach their maximum performance potential, results in personal and professional transformation that creates a positive ripple effect throughout the client’s team, their organization, and their life.

Executive coaching engagements equip, encourage and empower leaders to reach their full potential both in their career and in their life.  Through core value assessment and alignment, an awareness of gifts / interests / abilities / traits, strength-based development and the illumination of blind spots, leaders are challenged to step into their passion and to become the superstar they are intended to be.

Our coaching model focuses on:

• strength-based coaching versus “fixing” weaknesses
• empowerment coaching that equips leaders to reach their full potential
• transformational coaching by illuminating blind spots, and
• the transfer of coaching skills and tools that will benefit leaders in their current role and throughout their career.

Many leaders play “small” for a multitude of reasons but the end result is the same – they are shortchanging both the company and themselves.  Through the coaching relationship, leaders often:

• experience monumental breakthroughs
• are able to create outcomes they never before thought possible - both personally and professionally,  and
• become fully engaged in the workplace - which contributes immediately to the overall effectiveness of the organization.

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In spite of the economic downturn and the moderate influx in the candidate pool across several industries, employers continue to be challenged internally by:   

• Ineffective and inefficient hiring processes
• Poor quality of hires by internal hiring managers (hiring based on “gut” feeling)
• Poor quality of candidates submitted by external recruiters
• Inability to locate and attract the best fit
• Lack of consistency in hiring practices
• High employee turnover
• Undefined employee value proposition
• High recruitment cost, low return on investment
• No long term recruitment strategy
• Lack of a talent mindset

At Executive Impact, we believe that employee retention begins with selection.  For this reason, we offer our clients a comprehensive talent selection process designed to drastically reduce hiring mistakes, increase the employee retention rate and increase the ROI on our clients’ talent investment.

Executive Impact works with our clients to: 

• Understand the company culture and chemistry, organizational structure, operational strengths and weaknesses, industry standing and competitive advantages, and long term strategic goals
• Solidify position requirements and develop KPIs for open positions
• Benchmark the role and/or team
• Screen and interview candidates based on the Top Grading and behavioral interviewing methodologies
• Formally assess candidates for character and behavioral competency
• Create, enhance the clients’ onboarding process for selected candidates 

As our clients’ strategic talent partner, Executive Impact works with our clients to attract, assess and select the best and brightest.

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By the year 2015, the BLS expects the gap to be at it’s widest and the management and leadership talent available to employers is expected to be at an all time low.

In The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman identifies the reality of the global marketplace and its affect on our country.  His work further exposes some of the socio, economic, generational and technological challenges that are created as a result of globalization and what some companies are doing to meet the challenges.  While some of their efforts are working, others have problems yet to be resolved.

In the meantime, employers are left to sort through the details in their own day-to-day world.  It is true that businesses and business leaders are facing some of the most unique and complex challenges in history.  However, there are fundamental yet powerful talent management strategies and solutions that, when implemented, will position employers – not only to meet the challenges – but to create long term success.

Executive Impact works with its clients to assess, evaluate, and identify opportunities to improve, redefine, or recreate solutions in the following areas:

• Overall Talent Management Strategies
• Recruitment Process and Practices
• Executive and Leadership Selection
• Leadership and Team Development
• Individual, Team and Cultural Assessments
• 360 Degree Assessments
• Onboarding and Retention Strategies
• Succession Planning
• Performance Improvement
• Employee Engagement Surveys
• Employee Turnover Assessments
• Employee Relations / Conflict Resolution
• Outplacement and Career Coaching

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Alissa DeWitt, CPC, CERS, CMEC

…began her career in 1988 in Human Resources and has since served as a corporate human resources executive, an executive search consultant/strategic talent partner, executive coach and leadership development consultant.

As a corporate human resources executive, Alissa led the human resources division of a national organization in addition to serving as the lead HR advisor on the corporate Mergers/Acquisition team.  Alissa built the human resources infrastructure, recruited and trained a team of 40 HR professionals, and helped build a start up company with $26m in venture capital funding “from the ground up.” Through exponential growth of revenue and employee population within an aggressive M&A environment, the company grew to a $6b entity within five years.

Alissa spent the last 10 years of her career as an entrepreneur.  In 2003, she founded The Search Firm, a boutique, executive retained search firm focused on delivering exceptional talent to exceptional companies.  In addition to creating and providing her clients with a comprehensive candidate acquisition and selection process, Alissa co-authored the 2008 NAPS Employee Retention Certification Curriculum.

In January, 2009, Alissa founded Executive Impact, an executive coaching and leadership development firm.  Having had extensive experience in human resources, executive recruiting, and coaching, Alissa has been active in facilitating targeted employee selection, executive coaching and leadership development, succession planning and retention strategies at all levels within an organization.

As a Certified Mastermind Executive Coach, Certified Life Purpose Coach, Certified Personnel Consultant, Certified Employee Retention Specialist, and Master Coach and Instructor of a widely used Life Purpose & Vocational Calling Assessment tool, today Alissa uses her experience and passion to equip, encourage and empower her clients to be their best in every area of life.

MISSION: To encourage, equip and empower professionals, emerging leaders and executives to reach their maximum performance potential in their career, their business and their life

VISION: Innovator in the area of values-driven leadership development - making an “executive impact” in the marketplace

Principal Bio

To insure value creation and the long term success of a merger or acquisition, a disciplined, strategic approach to the transaction is critical. Only when executed properly will that strategy increase the odds that the expected benefits will be fully realized. 

Losing top talent and key leadership during such critical transitional periods can create significant, if not irrepairable, damage to the operating environment.  Incompatible cultural differences and differences in decision making and leadership styles can create further conflict within the organization.  All of these conflicts lead to internal instability and a decline in productivity and can result in the ultimate failure of the merger or acquisition, both strategically and economically.

In this time of economic turbulence, the role of HR & Talent Management advisors to a merger or acquisition is more important than ever; companies cannot afford to ignore the “people” part of the transaction.

Taking into account the initial strategy that prompted the merger or acquisition, Executive Impact assists in creating alignment and capturing synergy in merging or acquiring entities.  In order to do so, we:

• Assess the “talent resources” of the organizations
• Identify and compare the company culture and corporate business objectives
• Assess and audit the Human Resources infrastructure, benefit programs, policies, processes and procedures; performing related gap analysis and recommendations for integration
• Develop overall strategies for talent integration and retention
• Collaborate with leadership to insure proactive communication
• Provide guidance throughout the integration process  

Our goal is to streamline the time, resources, and expenses associated with the merger or acquisition.  By assisting our clients in proactively assessing and effectively integrating the talent resources, we help them to create a high performance leadership team.  By partnering with them to thoroughly assess each aspect of the human resources function, we help them to protect themselves from potential liability and to build a proper foundation upon which to operate the new organizational structure. 

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